"Nobody makes almost $800,000 for being a city manager in a town of less than 40,000 people," Brown said, according to transcript highlights given to the Weekly.

He continued:

That's more than the president, that's more than anybody else in America as far as I can tell. If we can find wrong doing here then we can roll back that salary and we can protect the impact on the pension. Because this thing is not just pay out for today, but a payout for decades if it fits into the pension system that California has.

If it is we are going to put a stop to it. When you act as a public official, you have a fiduciary duty to the people. That means you have to act with reason and not capriciously. The city charter of the city of Bell says that the salary is to be commensurate with the duties. So what are these duties that allow the manager to make almost $800,000 the police chief to make over 400,00 far more than the police chief of Los Angeles? And how does this thing fit together when the city councilmen are making almost $100,000. Something really smells.

The Bell City Council was scheduled to discuss the matter tonight. Community activists want the heads of most on the council as well as the mayor over the salary scandal.

Dennis Romero has worked on staff at several magazines and newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian, and, as a
young stringer, the New York Times.